CIFF: "One Hundred Nails" and "Home of the Giants"

By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 14, 2007 7:17PM

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival.

A plot summary of Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails doesn't really capture its charm. It's a simple parable about a young philosophy professor who becomes so disillusioned that he snaps. After committing a particularly poetic act of vandalism (which we won't spoil for you), he flees to the countryside, where he appropriates an abandoned hut on the edge of the Po River and begins fixing it up. Meanwhile, however, the police are still on his trail. The movie's religious themes don't overwhelm the lyrical beauty of the countryside, and a well-chosen cast (including many non-professionals) adds a lot of rustic flavor. If only some heavy-handedness at the end didn't spoil things. Still, it's a pleasant journey most of the way.

If you had told us that one day we would be recommending a high school basketball crime thriller starring Haley Joel Osment, we would have asked you what meds you were on. But that's exactly what we're doing.

Home of the Giants is skillful, believable and genuinely suspenseful. Osment plays Gar, a journalist on the school paper who serves as unofficial mascot to the basketball team's hotshot star, Matt, who uses him to to get rides around town and stroke his ego. When Matt's no-good brother gets out of prison and hatches a plan for a robbery, you know things are going to go south pretty fast. And when a girl on the school paper realizes something's fishy, she starts doing a little digging.

Set in Indiana but mostly shot in North Carolina,
local director Rusty Gorman's movie is a modest affair, which makes its clear-eyed dissection of high school hypocrisy and fresh-faced corruption that much more satisfying. Riverton High is the kind of place where the journalism teacher angrily explains that "we don't write articles that bad-mouth the team," while every post-game celebration seems to center on the local Wendy's. Gar faces a tug of war between his sense of right and wrong and his hero-worship for Matt. The ending tries to have things both ways, but it's a minor flaw in a movie that consistently offers up surprises. When the story goes into thriller mode it actually works because these are well-drawn characters instead of just plot devices.

One Hundred Nails screens tonight and Tuesday; Home of the Giants screens on Tuesday. Call 312-332-FILM for details.